~ 'a fire was in my head' ~ W.B. Yeats

Communication Apprehension

Communication Apprehensionis a trait coined by James McCroskey. He originally defined it as a “broadly based anxiety related to oral communication.” It is later slightly modified to read “an individual’s level of fear or anxiety associated with either real or anticipated communication with other person(s).

Communication apprehension or CA is a social phenomenon. A West Virginia University study on CA reports that one in five persons are classified as high CA.

Surveys on people’s great fears noted that fear of public speaking is on top of the list. Fear of dying is only number 5. Technically, a person would rather die than speak in front of a large number of people. As many as 80 percent of the US population believe that speaking in public is the scariest thing there is to be asked to do, and this malady has been reported as America’s number one fear.

I’m a bit nostalgic for what was my academic game while serving time in grad school. There’s Dr. McCroskey behind my daily brunches in the early 2000s.

I remember once having to speak in front of a large group, the speaker would ask me questions and I would answer. Of course this was rehearsed ahead of time, therefore, I had my answers written on small cards. When I started to talk, my cards begin to shake. Later my daughter asked the speaker how he thought I did, he laughed and said, she did fine until she started to throw her cards at me. It wasn’t quite that bad, but, I really was shaking, until I was finished speaking.